Frankie Cook remembers last year’s car crash only in flashes.
She was driving a friend home from high school on a winding road outside Rome, Georgia. She saw standing water from a recent rain. She tried to slow down but lost control of her car on a big curve. “The car flipped about three times,” Frankie said. “We spun around and went off the side of this hill. My car was on its side, and the back end was crushed up into a tree.”
Frankie said the air bags deployed and both passengers were wearing seat belts, so she was left with just a headache when her father, Russell Cook, came to pick her up from the crash site.
Frankie, then a high school junior, worried she might have a concussion that could affect her performance on an upcoming Advanced Placement exam, so she and her father decided to stop by an urgent care center near their house to get her checked out. They didn’t make it past the front desk.
“‘We don’t take third-party insurance,'” Russell said the receptionist at Atrium Health Floyd Urgent Care Rome told him, though he wasn’t sure what she meant. “She told me, like, three times.”